Posted By Daniel Greenfield On June 28, 2013 @ 11:57 am In The Point | 1 Comment

While this is an interesting story, the idea of the KGB teaching the Muslim world to hate Jews is a little like the Muslim world teaching the Soviet Union to spy on its own people. There’s a long pre-existing tradition of that sort of thing.

The highest-ranking Soviet-bloc intelligence officer ever to defect to the West claims in a new book that anti-American Islamic terrorism had its roots in a secret 1970s-era KGB plot to harm but the United States and Israel by seeding Muslim countries with carefully targeted propaganda.

Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief for 15 years before he became the Soviet premier, sent hundreds of agents and thousands of copies of propaganda literature to Muslim countries.

Andropov began his leadership of the KGB just months before the 1967 Six-Day War between Arabs and Israelis, in which Israel humiliated the key Soviet allies Syria and Egypt. And he decided to settle the score by training Palestinian militants to hijack El Al airplanes and bomb sites in Jerusalem.

But more shocking, Andropov commissioned the first Arabic translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian-forged 1905 propaganda book that alleged Jews were plotting to take over Europe – and were being aided by the United States.

The Protocols book, Pacepa claims, became ‘the basis for much of Hitler’s anti-Semitic philosophy.’ And the KGB, he writes, disseminated ‘thousands of copies’ in Muslim countries during the 1970s.

The KGB was just following in the footsteps of the Nazis which had also sent out copies of the Protocols to the Muslim world. But considering the origin of the Protocols in the Russian Secret Police in the Czarist era, there is something ironically appropriate about their Soviet successors passing it out.

In 1972, Pacepa writes, his DIE agency ‘received from the KGB an Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion along with “documentary” material, also in Arabic, “proving” that the United States was a Zionist country.”He was ‘ordered,’ he adds, ‘to “discreetly” disseminate both “documents” within its targeted Islamic countries.’